Metropolitan trophies

Combining beauty, savoir-faire, irony, derision and at times even cynicism, Pucci de Rossi has been creating work that is a close reflection of who we are and where we come from. Both sensual and erotic, but also graceless and grotesque, his furniture and sculptures are terribly or wonderfully human, in other words they appear just as grandiose as they are poignant. All the poetry of Pucci de Rossi is the result of this potpourri; the idea that true beauty provokes and attracts, but also makes one laugh and is something of which one can make fun. ¹

This art of contradiction is consistent with the Surrealist tradition that, from Duchamps to Magritte, including De Chirico, has demonstrated that the unseemly meeting of opposing realities could reveal strange truths to us For example, by combining the traditional savoir-faire of the Louis XVI chair with the industrial kitsch of Formica (Luis Luis, 1985), or by redesigning the Napoleon desk, while drawing inspiration from the shape of the Emperor's hat (Napoleon's Desk, 1996), Pucci de Rossi affectionately makes fun of the conventions of his age. He juxtaposes the beaux-arts and popular traditions, the invaluable and the common, the serious and the futile, and offers us works with a sublime strangeness.²

The oddities that Pucci de Rossi has again created for his latest show are truly superb. Faced with these trophies of sensual, unusual curves, feelings are divided and contradict one other. Surprising and déjà-vu, fascinating and repulsive, these shapes appear strange and disconcerting to us.³ Like Magritte combing a house bathed in a nocturnal penumbra under a sky-blue sky, Pucci de Rossi alienates realities from their common meaning by juxtaposing them on other opposite assumptions. Here, on the face of it, several worlds coexist contrary to nature: hunting, contemporary art, trademarks, industrial series, traditional workmanship, etc.

More than a mere decoration, the trophy symbolises the values defended by hunting: the victory of man over the animal, as well as all the traditions and techniques perpetuated by this or that kind of hunting. For example, if the animal was killed during hunting, the hunter not only shows off his victory, but also his knowledge of nature, his ability to ride a horse, to train his dogs, etc. Hunting has existed for centuries and its practice is no longer "technologically" justified. The desire to preserve a tradition is the key to its practice, and hunting is all the more enjoyable when it is done "the old-fashioned way". And lastly, a hunting trophy is an object that needs to be as natural as possible, meaning that it must be as "true" as possible to what the living animal looks like. ⁴

In the first instance, contemporary art appears opposed to these values. In the gallery, no animal has been killed for art's sake and art ceased to be interested in representing nature a long time ago. The exhibition space is not meant to worry about traditions. On the contrary, it glorifies imagination, creativity and the latest novelty. So we are apparently in the presence of a dialectic where two "theses" contradict each other. This is when a certain "magic" occurs. Thus, displaced and placed out of context, the worlds of hunting and art get rid of the deceptive veil that is our daily life, and the habit we have of seeing things from a single and often conventional angle. So Pucci de Rossi shows us that, far from contradicting each other, art and hunting have surprising similarities. Of course, there is a lot that is surprising in this "synthesis". But as Magritte explained, the true poetic power of an unusual association comes from the affinity of juxtaposed worlds in itself, an affinity that we would not know how to see without the help of the artist.⁵

In this context, it may be that hunting and art respond to the same exclusively human feeling, that is, the desire to rise above the laws of nature, to prove the superiority of our species over the animal world. If we are the only "mammals" to have an artistic sense, we are also the only that hunt for pleasure - in other words, practise the art of hunting. Besides, do not the paintings discovered in the prehistoric caves that represent primarily hunting scenes, seem to prove the primitive association of these two activities? It would be risky to attempt to explain in just a few lines to what extent it is possible to confuse the essence of art with that of hunting. Nevertheless, by assimilating artist and hunter, Pucci de Rossi seems to wish to take us to a more instinctive dimension of art. Like hunting, art is now a part of the civilised world of entertainment and leisure activities. However, the unconscious motives and instincts to which he appeals remain primitive.

At the same time, this confrontation between art and hunting, tradition and contemporary, enlightens us a little about the real nature of the work of Pucci de Rossi. Although he stands strictly within a contemporary prospective, he remains no less deeply attached to working with materials (in particular, wood), to the love of the "bel ouvrage" and to the "hand-made". For him, like for many among us, all works of art must be based on an idea, a concept. In other words, they must have something to tell us. Nevertheless, limiting oneself to a single concept, no matter how fascinating, is not enough. It is indispensable that the work be desirable, that it attracts us and makes us want to possess it and look at it. Because, for Pucci de Rossi, who likes to define himself as an "apartment sculptor", an artist is all the more persuasive and his message much better perceived, the more seductive the work of art is. The universe of Pucci de Rossi is our living space; he enjoys decorating and embellishing it and he can also infiltrate our daily life to better challenge and subvert it. Art and hunting, tradition and contemporary: Pucci de Rossi shows us that the synthesis can be made, that it is possible to cast a new look on one's era while remaining guarantor of a savoir-faire.

But just when we believe that we have understood it all, a new contradiction appears. Because some of the horns are not only "re-designed" and stylised in the manner of the artist. Subtly and elegantly, Pucci de Rossi has embodied them with the forms of these nebulous concepts that overwhelm us a little more every day: trademarks. The strange moufflon horns are none other than the McDonald logo, the moose horns depict the Nike symbol and, at a closer look, it now seems that we are surrounded by our daily advertising environment. So we find ourselves back in a situation similar to the previous. While the juxtaposition of hunting and contemporary art allows Pucci de Rossi to "reaffirm the manuality of the artist" and rewrite contemporary art within a traditional framework, industrial series and traditional workmanship, contemporary art and global trade now confront each other.

Symptoms of industrial society, trademarks and their logos have invaded our daily field of vision and even become a veritable form of pollution. In order to better define and understand them, Pucci de Rossi removes trademarks from their normal context and associates them with worlds that are assumed to be perfectly antinomic: hunting, tradition, traditional workmanship and contemporary art. Once again this association, on the face of it surprising, finally appears obvious.

The sociologist Jean Baudrillard has highlighted the fundamental difference that exists between industrial and traditional production methods. "In traditional production methods, objects reflect needs in their contingency, their uniqueness." In other words, objects are only manufactured to meet a need pre-existing their creation. On the contrary, "From the industrial age, objects manufactured acquire a coherence bestowed upon them for technical reasons and economic structures."⁶ So we live in a system in which the creation of objects no longer meets the call for a need, but rather the logic of a system. In order to justify its production of objects, this system must therefore create the need. Nowadays, this need is introduced among others by creating a trademark and a multitude of values attached to it. In this way, purchasing no longer corresponds to a material need, but to an identity-based unconscious motive in which the act of the consumer reflects an adhesion to so-called values.

So what are these values with which the consumer identifies while shopping? Do they have a meaning? Have they become the only refuge for a world in an identity crisis? Clouded to the point of obsession by these questions, Pucci de Rossi has been trying for a long time to understand what is really hidden behind the trademark concept. By transforming them into hunting trophies, he unveils a little of the real nature of these signs. Because the trademark is a trophy in itself. A trophy that we show off more or less ostentatiously, more or less proudly, but that seems to be an integral part of our personality. To a certain extent, consumer society leads us to show the product of our labour by displaying this or that trademark like a hunter hanging up the fruit of his hunting on the walls of his living room.

Following the same train of thought, it is possible to associate the name of an artist dedicated to the trademark concept. So we will say of someone that he owns a Picasso, this information alone being enough to bestow numerous personal and social values upon the owner of the work, without any concern for the artistic quality of the painting. It appears here that the main question the belief in a trademark raises, is not so much the identity-based reflex attached to it, but rightly the detachment that eventually occurs between the aforementioned trademark and the values that it is meant to represent. It is precisely this that Pucci de Rossi challenges.

His approach here is very close to that of Andy Warhol, who has highlighted our fascination with images and celebrities. When the latter produced the series of portraits of Marilyn, it is the image of Marilyn that interested him and not the actress. Warhol showed us the extent of the existence of two distinct entities: on the one hand the human being, on the other its image. When the image eventually becomes a myth, it lives on its own, is separated completely from the personality to which it is attached and acquires a dimension beyond time and reality. As Baudrillard described it, the star's image is not real but "hyper-real".

The same applies to trademarks. Given a lot of media coverage, they are soon raised to the level of myth. Separated from the products that they represent, they exist on their own in a hyper-real world, a world of signs that floats around without any real ties. Signifiers that have lost their signifieds, trademarks that have become myths represent nothing. And yet, they continue to demand our attachment and loyalty to their values. These are the symbols devoid of meaning and burdened with questions that Pucci de Rossi decided to single out for criticism. His questioning does not concern the trademarks themselves, but their mystification. The growing anti-globalisation movements, or even the immensely successful book by Naomi Klein, No Logo, The Tyrannyof Trademarks, are there to remind us of it: in spite of the confusion and at times incoherence of the protest message, our society refuses to submit to what is considered to be the diktat of free trade. Observing these logos hanging on the walls, it seems to us that, thanks to the artist, we have already won part of the battle waged against some of the ravages of the modern age.